Dishonored News | PCGamesN

It can be a little disheartening to look at the broad sweep of immersive sim development. Is Dishonored really a decade and a half’s advancement away from Thief? And what on Earth was going on in those eight years between DeusExes?

Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio has a more positive outlook on the shape of complex action game development. After a dip in the ‘00s, he believes the public appetite for games like Dishonored will only increase.

There’s a great deal of love for Dishonored around the PCGN offices.* Jeremy and Rob, in particular, won’t speak to anyone who hasn’t walked the streets of Dunwall and tried to vindicate Corvo in the eyes of its denizens.

If you’re one of the types that they wouldn’t speak to then you still have a chance to redeem yourself. Next week sees the release of Dishonored’s Game of the Year Edition.

Did you know? By the time Dishonored: Game of the Year edition rolls up in October, its parent game will have been around for a whole year. I feel as if greatness has somehow been normalised in the interim.

Arkane Studios, meanwhile, have become the new darlings of the games industry. They’re currently “ramping up on what comes next", say Bethesda. “Next-gen development".

You could make a pretty convincing argument in defence of the box art for Dishonored’s Game of the Year edition. Its contours, see, reflect the fact that Dunwall is as much about place - the sense of it, the atmosphere of it, the navigation of it - as it is about people. Dunwall is the face of Dishonored, is what you might say.

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Adolf Hitler’s rejection from the Vienna Academy of Art has become one of history’s ultimate What Ifs. Who knows, goes the thought, how things would’ve turned out had he been accepted?

The same can’t be said for Daud-hating Delilah, murderous witch and fictional antagonist of Dishonored’s last chunk of DLC. Because if she had applied to Dunwall’s local art school, she’d undoubtedly have got in. Check out her work below.

You can’t simply invite witches into your game. You have to prepare: secure broom parking points; custom slippers built to support their square feet; gas fireplaces to replace culturally insensitive hearths; that sort of thing.

Arkane know this, and have put together a big old patch ahead of The Brigmore Witches’ release next week. One thing the covens can’t abide, I’m told, is dodgy admin - and so the developers have put straight a bug that meant NPCs killed by fall damage were missing from the game’s end-of-level kill stats screen.

A Game of the Year edition of Arkane’s revenge (or if you’re playing the DLC, redemption) sim was briefly spotted with a blade to the throat of the Australian Classification Board yesterday, before it had a chance to blink away.

How closely does the name ‘Brigmore Witches’ resemble that of B*Witched, the ‘90s Irish girl group? Not that closely, actually, but just enough that I can’t now seem to claw their songs and freeze-frame-jump promo shots out of my head.

Fortunately, there’s 40 minutes of Dishonored DLC footage to hand with which to flush them out.

In just under three weeks, Dishonored’s last planned slice of DLC will be plated up and served hot on Steam. In the meantime, we’re stuck in one of those elastic never-want-it-to-end, can’t-come-soon-enough fidgety periods. To ease the ear-popping pain of temporal fluctuation, Bethesda bring artwork freshly ripped from the walls of Dunwall, and a journal entry nabbed from the desk of somebody who was probably standing right there.

The Brigmore Witches will see an end to not only Daud’s tale, but also our dalliance with Arkane’s stellar first-person sneaker, my game of the year, Dishonored. On August 13 the developers will move onto other projects, and we’ll come face to mask with a very familiar assassin and one-time Royal Bodyguard: Corvo Attano.

Where’s Daud’s Amphibian Feet Flaps upgrade at? We spent a good portion of The Knife of Dunwall in and among the drowned architecture of the Flooded District, and it doesn’t seem the (potentially) reformed master assassin will even have time to rinse those lovely leather gloves before wading out again in pursuit of the titular Brigmore Witches. Soggy.

Arkane last spotted Bethesda man of marketing Pete Hines lining up Dishonored accolades in their Austin, Texas office car park to spell out the word ‘sequel’. Or so Hines’ comments last year would suggest. “We clearly have a new franchise," he proudly proclaimed at the time.

In a recent chat with IGN, he seemed every bit as enthusiastic - and suggested that the future of the series lies in the hands of Arkane alone.

This edition of The Weekly Playlist is a special issue, rather than bring you a smorgasboard of gaming stories, Rob and Jeremy argue the case for which of them is playing Dishonored "right". Should Dunwall be delivered from its corrupt overlords by way of the knife or the sleeping dart? Is Rob's violence playing into the hands of those being disposed of? Or, is Jeremy's nonlethality simply an exercise in moral self-deception?

When we all celebrated Mother’s Day two months ago in the UK, Americans were conspicuous by their absence. None of us said anything at the time, of course - in this country, politeness trumps pragmatism. But somebody must have realised their mistake yesterday, and suddenly everyone in the US was driving across town to see their mothers, to try and rectify their mistake.

One of those people was Dishonored producer and game designer Seth Shain, who decided this weekend to detail to his mum precisely what he does for a living. Here’s how it went.

While preordering a game may be a slightly strange concept in this digital age where there is almost no worry of games stock ever running out and thus requiring copies to be put aside, companies have taken to rewarding the practice with added gubbins. An exclusive weapon here, a VIP map there, a statue of a dismembered woman’s corpse, what have you.

Though, if you weren’t into the whole preordering schtick you may have missed out on Dishonored’s miscellany. Have no fear Bethesda are releasing the extras as a DLC pack called the Void Walker Arsenal.

The Knife of Dunwall’s defining characteristic is confidence. Confidence in its setting, the world that Arkane created with Dishonored. Confidence in you, the player, and your ability to navigate increasingly dense and dangerous levels that are as unforgiving as anything in the core game. Confidence in itself, in being able to break free from its predecessor and pursue a story with a character whose fate we already know.

From the outset, we understand that our character, the assassin Daud, is doomed. His godlike patron, The Outsider, tells him as much in the opening scene. He cannot escape what his assassination of Empress Kaldwin has set in motion, and it will be the end of him. But is he damned as well as doomed? It is possible, in this powerful expansion to one of last year’s best games, to find some redemption in the twilight of a long and bloody career. But you still have to face Dunwall.

Thousands of identical Empresses will be murdered across the globe today in scenes muddy onlookers will describe as, “harrowing, but sorta familiar". Yes, Dishonored’s alternate-perspective day-to-day-Daud sim is out, it’s the best game of last year’s first story-driven DLC campaign to date, and it’s probably going to be brilliant.

I’m getting a distinct dying-whale-growl vibe from this latest Dishonored DLC trailer. You’ll have to see for yourself, but there’s just the faintest whiff of blubber-borne shame about the whole affair.

I was careful, let me assure you of that. God knows I took my time. But by the time I’d hopped, skipped and temporally jumped my way through Dunwall, I’d been credited with at least two murders that I couldn’t for the life of me remember committing. Fortunately I’d caused an accident with an errant guard and a bomb back in the prologue, and didn’t retain any pretensions of a clean playthrough. But given Dishonored’s meticulous approach to score-keeping, an even slightly wonky mission stat kill list is unforgivable.

This week’s Steam update is partly about that: fixing the rare occasions when the game declares deaths unwarranted. But it’s also about Dunwall City Trials, the challenge mode released in December that’s still, for a few more days, the game’s only expansion to date.

Dishonored is Dunwall and Dunwall is Dishonored: never has a game been more inextricably tied to a fictional place. But when Arkane first conceived the game, Dishonored was to be set in medieval Japan. In a GDC talk entitled 'World of Dishonored: Raising Dunwall', Art Director Sebastien Mitton revealed that the idea was dropped because of the difficulties it presented in marketing, and because Arkane didn’t know the culture.